Monthly Archives: February 2014

Today we’re announcing pricing for MarkedUp. One of the biggest concerns we’ve heard from customers over the past year and a half is that they haven’t been able to pay us for our service. We know that you want us to be around for years to come so you can use our services in all of your applications.

MarkedUp Analytics has been available in public beta since October 2012, and I wanted to share some data about our progress.

Since 2012 we’ve had more than 40 million devices run over 1000 apps over 180 million times! We’ve observed more than 10 million crashes and 80 million exceptions JavaScript and C#. And most impressively, we’ve observed over a 1 billion session events.

And we could not have done any of this without developers like you using our service. Thank you!

We care deeply about our community, which is why we’ve responded to over 300 support tickets from our users within a business day – most of them within the hour! We’ve enjoyed building a community on our twitter account and facebook page and we’ve spoken with many of our users over Skype, email, and in-person at conferences like //BUILD and the Cassandra Summit.

When I founded MarkedUp, I wanted to make it easy for app developers to see how their end-users actually use their apps. I wanted to make you excited when you saw users around the world install your brand new app in real-time, make you aware when your app is crashing and having trouble, and help you discover who your paying customers are.

We’re fully committed to always having a free tier. It’s central to our values as software developers ourselves. We want to make sure that developers can test and deploy new applications on our platform at no cost.

Pricing Plans for Apps

Maximum Users

Monthly Cost

Free

10,000

-

50K Users

50,000

$49

100K Users

100,000

$99

300K Users

300,000

$150

1M Users

1,000,000

$450

Unlimited

Unlimited

$1,000

MarkedUp’s perpetual free tier covers all apps with fewer than 10,000 distinct monthly users – beyond that paid plans begin at $49 a month and will have access to some yet-to-be-announced new features and services that will be coming soon.

We chose to charge based off of the number of users because sticking with our original pricing plan, charging per the volume of data collected, would have been… kind of insane.

Accruing a million data points in a month is astonishingly easy. And while we do need to be able to build a sustainable revenue stream in order to ensure that MarkedUp is around for years to come, nickel-and-diming our users who every log message and session event they collect is not the way to do it.

How to Upgrade Your App to a Premium Plan

You can upgrade to your app by going to the new “Plans” tab on your dashboard.

And select the most appropriate plan from the list:

And then follow the steps in the checkout wizard to complete your upgrade.

I will be reaching out to all customers who will be impacted by these pricing changes. Your service will not be interrupted – we will always collect data on your behalf even if you have an outstanding bill.

It’s important to note that after you select your plan you will not be charged until March 1st, when this pricing goes into effect. MarkedUp will charge you at the beginning of each month going forward, based on your previous month’s usage.

A Special Gift for MarkedUp Beta Users

I’ve communicated with many of you individually about our pricing already, long before this announcement. I’m amazed by our community – we have intelligent customers who build exceptional apps and whose feedback we’ve directly incorporated into MarkedUp’s features and product roadmap.

So as a way of saying thank you to all of you, we’re offering a 50% discount on all premium plans for 12 months to everyone who upgrades to a paid plan before March 1st.

Go to your plans page for all apps you want to upgrade and use the coupon code BETACUSTOMER to activate your discount.

And once you’ve hit the “Apply” button on the plans page, you’ll see the pricing drop immediately for all plans.

And there you have it. This coupon is only good if you use it before March 1st, so activate it soon!

If you have any questions about our pricing our billing practices, please contact me and the rest of the MarkedUp team at support@markedup.com – we’ll provide you with a speedy reply to any of your questions!

The chart above plots the total number of known Surface RT 1 units that connected to MarkedUp’s services over the course of the past year.

As you can see, the Surface RT 1 had sluggish adoption in early 2013 but rapidly accelerated beginning in March / April – the likely cause of that growth is due to Microsoft’s introduction of the Surface RT tablet into new markets and additional promotions /exposure described earlier.

However, the Surface RT’s growth really exploded around the June / July 2013 timeframe – right when the Surface’s prices slashed. Bear in mind that late Summer and Winter are Microsoft’s two strongest sales quarters for consumer products – “Back to School” and “Holiday” sales respectively.

Average number of monthly Surface RT 1 units sold prior to price drop

105,452 monthly units

Average number of monthly Surface RT 1 units sold after to price drop

358,044 monthly units

As you can see from the data table above, the monthly sales volume of Microsoft’s Surface RT 1 units tripled following the price cut – moving from roughly 100,000 units per month to 350,000 per month.

We plotted the net number of new devices per month to help confirm this:

You can see a big ramp up of sales in July and August, followed by a drop in September. That’s natural – back to school sales typically end by Labor Day in early September, so there’s going to be a big drop following August.

But what’s really telling about this graph is that the number of units sold in September is still greater than what was sold in July (another strong B2S sales month), which is unusual. Here’s the raw data table to supplement the chart.

Surface RT 1 Worldwide Adoption January 2013-2014

Month

New Devices

Total Devices

2013-01

75,535

75,535

2013-02

72,701

148,236

2013-03

83,678

231,914

2013-04

96,134

328,048

2013-05

120,522

448,570

2013-06

184,140

632,710

2013-07

246,299

879,009

2013-08

339,794

1,218,803

2013-09

249,798

1,468,601

2013-10

318,291

1,786,892

2013-11

321,131

2,108,023

2013-12

556,965

2,664,988

2014-01

474,030

3,139,018

It was generally believed that issues with the Windows 8 and Surface RT user experience were the tablet’s primary barriers to adoption. It is our conclusion that the real issues might have been awareness and price sensitivity.

So why is the Surface product line starting to look healthier for Microsoft now? Is the Surface 2 or Surface Pro such a drastic improvement over the Surface RT tablets that it’s been able to single-handedly double Microsoft’s Surface revenue? Not exactly.

By the end of December 2013, we started seeing roughly 60,000 new Surface RT 2 devices activated per month – a pretty good start for a new device that’s still trying to build up brand recognition with consumers.

However, its older cousin, the Surface RT 1, sold well over 500,000 copies in December.

Surface RT 1 vs. Surface RT 2 Devices Activated per Month

Month

Surface RT 1

Surface RT 2

2013-01

75,535

0

2013-02

72,701

0

2013-03

83,678

0

2013-04

96,134

0

2013-05

120,522

0

2013-06

184,140

0

2013-07

246,299

0

2013-08

339,794

131

2013-09

249,798

130

2013-10

318,291

10,315

2013-11

321,131

34,476

2013-12

556,965

62,905

2014-01

474,030

61,340

Total

3,139,018

169,299

Conclusion

It’s difficult to reconcile this data with the theory that the Surface RT 1’s inability to meet Microsoft’s original sales estimate was due to the product design itself, if you assume that the Surface RT 2 is an improved product (which it is.)

Aside from the innate improvements made to the Surface 2 and its novelty, the only other major difference between the two generations of Surface is price. Microsoft moves many times more tablets when the starting price point is at $349 versus $499.

In a subsequent update, we will perform a similar analysis for the higher-end Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2 tablets.

MarkedUp’s Collection Methods

Our data is collected from apps that are installed directly onto end-user machines, so our data set is limited to “devices that have installed an app that uses MarkedUp.”

That being said, this data set is covers roughly 10% of all Windows 8 machines ever sold. Our numbers for Windows Phone are similarly impressive, but excluded from this data-set (naturally.)

There is some latency between when a device is sold to an end-user and when we “discover” it by way of an app installation; however, having been in market since before Windows 8 was launched, our data set has historically mirrored the market as it moves in real-time. We see giant surges on Christmas morning, after Black Friday, and so forth.

Devices can be counted multiple times, depending on the number of installed apps from distinct MarkedUp-enabled publishers and the version of our SDK that was used. Our facts and figures accurately reflect trends and changes in direction in the market, but not precise figures.

These reports are anonymized aggregations of our entire data-set.

The data in this report tracks the number of net new devices activated on our platform per month, starting from January 2013 to January 2014.

Coming Soon: MarkedUp Analytics for Windows Desktop Applications

The first new platform that MarkedUp will fully support is Win32 – the platform used for building traditional Windows desktop applications.

We may have mobile and touch platforms like iOS and Android to thank for the resurgence of native application development over the past five years, but the Windows Desktop is the original developer platform.

The Windows Desktop economy is strong and growing, doing over $100b+ a year in license + services sales directly to end-users annually.

However, it’s a market that largely predates the Internet – and thus it’s had trouble adopting all of the software sales + marketing + product best practices that are commonly used throughout modern software development shops, largely due to lack of third party services and tools.

Modern software development practices depend on connected services like analytics and marketing automation to in order to make data-driven decisions, and it’s MarkedUp Analytics’ intention to finally make some of these services available to Windows Desktop developers.

The details

MarkedUp Analytics will support the following flavors of Win32 development:

Windows Forms: .NET 3.5 and later

Windows Presentation Foundation: .NET 3.5 and later

Native C/C++: Windows XP and later

Holy crap, you’re supporting C/C++ applications for Windows?!?!?!

Yes! Our native C/C++ components will support the all of the same APIs that are available in the .NET flavors of our Win32 SDK.

Worth noting: our C/C++ SDKs will depend on .NET.

How will your WPF / WinForms support compare to your WinRT and Windows Phone APIs?

They’re virtually identical. The only major difference is that our .NET 3.5 / .NET 4.0 / .NET 4.5 SDKs for WPF and WinForms development will expose more methods for manually handling events such as app start / termination.

Win32, by its very nature, is a much more open platform than WinRT / Windows Phone and thus the developers have a lot more options when it comes to how they manage the lifecycle of their applications.

Thus, we decided it would be inappropriate for MarkedUp to try to automate some of the things we do on WinRT and Windows Phone.

iOS and Android

There are a ton of choices for iOS and Android when it comes to app analytics and reporting – when we were developing apps ourselves, we frankly felt that many of these services were difficult to use, had sub-standard reporting, and non-existent service.

We still feel that way.

Thus, we are making it a goal of our to provide support for iOS and Android in the near future! They’re further out than Win32 support, but we’ll keep you updated on the latest.